Thomasina

I considered myself a good deal better off in Inveranoch than in Glasgow because Loch Fyne was an arm of the sea that pushed up from the ocean down by Greenock right up into the Highlands as far as Cairndow and brought with it gulls to watch in flight and the smell of the sea and fish and queer birds to chase that ran along the beach behind which lay a wonderful dark and scary country of woods and glens and mountains of stone in which to hunt. I was never allowed out in Glasgow, but it was quite different here and soon I became a real Highlander and we Highlanders, of course, looked down on everyone else.

Inveranoch was not as large a city as Glasgow, in fact, it was quite small with no more than a few thousand inhabitants, but to make up for that hundreds of visitors came there every summer for their holidays.

This was the busiest time for Mr MacDhui for the guests often brought their pets with them, mostly dogs, of course, but sometimes cats and birds, and once, a monkey, and the climate did not always agree with them or they would get themselves bitten or stung in the woods, or pick a fight with one of us Highlanders, which was foolish since they were much too soft and then their owners would have to bring them to Mr MacDhui for repairs. He seemed to take this in very ill part, for he was a man who hated pets and disliked being a veterinary and preferred to pass his time in the back country with the farmers and crofters rather than keep office hours.

However, none of this was any of my concern and I was fairly comfortable at this time and living a routine sufficiently to my own taste, except for one thing. Mary Ruadh had become a cat carrier.

If you have had or have a little girl yourself you will know what I am talking about. If not, you may have noticed that, at a certain age, little girls always carry a doll around wherever they go, but some carry their cat. Often they do not even know they are carrying it as they walk or toddle about with it. They hold it around the middle, just below the shoulders, clutched to their breast so that most of the cat dangles a dead weight with head and forequarters hanging over the arm.

Mary Ruadh did vary this most uncomfortable and humiliating position sometimes by placing me across her shoulders like a fur piece where I could rest and even be admired by people who sometimes said it was difficult to tell which was Mary Ruadh’s hair and which was me. I didn’t mind that. Or she would carry me upside down in both arms, like a little baby. I hated that.

If you ask me why I put up with it, I cannot tell you, since my philosophy of life is quite simple. When you find yourself in a situation where unpleasant things, or things you don’t like, occur more frequently than pleasant ones – walk out.

Well, there were other things too, which I wasn’t going to mention, but as long as I am on the subject, I might as well. There was the being made to sit on a chair sometimes at tea with a napkin around my neck and pretend I was a person, or rather, Mary Ruadh pretended. This got me a few caraway seed cakes of which I happened to be fond and a couple of laps of milk out of a saucer, but it didn’t make up for the indignity.

When I had kittens they took them away from me and drowned them.

At night I was forced to sleep at the foot of her bed. Nor could I go away to my favourite chair after she fell asleep for if she woke up and I was not there she would call for me and sob most heart-breakingly. Sometimes during the night, even when I was there, she would wake up and begin to cry softly in the darkness and murmur, “Mummy – Mummy!” for it seems she remembered her too. Then she would reach down in the darkness and wake me up and hold me to her so hard with her face buried in my flank that I could hardly breathe, and you know how we hate to be held.

She would then cry – “Oh, Thomasina, Thomasina, I love you. Don’t ever leave me.” After a little she would become more quiet and I would wash her face a little and lick the salt tears from her cheeks, which made her laugh and giggle and say – “Thomasina – you tickle,” and soon she would go to sleep again.

And I stayed on. Believe me, if it had been a little boy I should not have done so, thank you very much. I should soon enough have run away and not come back, taken to the woods, or found someone else in town to live with, for I am perfectly capable of looking after Thomasina. Though I may look delicate, I am most resilient, have a hardy constitution and can stand almost anything. Once a boy on a bicycle ran over me. Mrs McKenzie came running out of the house screaming that I was killed and Mary Ruadh cried and carried on so that it took an hour afterwards to calm her and all that happened was that the boy fell off his bicycle and hurt himself and I got up and walked away.

Well, and then there was Mr MacDhui himself and there is plenty I could tell you about him, and none of it favourable. An animal doctor who didn’t like animals – there’s a good one. A bit too quick with the chloroform rag when people brought their sick pets to his surgery, was what they said. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t want him treating me. Mr MacDhui was jealous of me because his daughter loved me so much, and he hated me. But what was even worse, he ignored me. Mr High-and-mighty-around-the-house. Nose in the air; whiskers bristling all the time. And the medicine smell of him. Ugh! It was the same one that came out of the hospital when you went past. When he returned home at night and bent down to kiss Mary Ruadh, his huge, bristly red face with the medicine and pipe smell would come right close to mine, since Mary Ruadh would be carrying me, and it made me feel sick.

Naturally, I annoyed him all I could, calling attention to myself by washing in front of him, taking care to be on his chair when I knew he would be wanting it, lying in doorways where he would be likely to trip over me, rubbing up against his legs and ankles, leaving hairs on his best clothes whenever I could find them and jumping up on his lap when he sat down to read the paper and making smells of my own. He did not dare to be rough with me when Mary Ruadh was in the room and so he would just pretend I was not there and then get up suddenly to go for some tobacco and dump me off his knees.

Add up all of these things and you might almost say it amounted to sufficient cause for me to move out. Yet I stayed on and was not too unhappy. I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone else, but if the truth be known, I was rather fond of the child.

I think it could have been because, in some ways, girl children and cats are not un-alike. There is some special mystery about little girls, an attitude of knowing secret things and a contemplative and not wholly complimentary quality about the way they look at you sometimes that is often as baffling and exasperating to their elders as we are.

If you have ever lived with a girl child, you will know that quiet, infuriating retirement into some private world of their own of which they are capable, as well as that stubborn independence in the face of stupid or unreasonable demands or prohibitions. These same traits seem to annoy you in us as well. For you can no more force a cat or a girl child to do something they do not wish to do than you can compel us to love you. We have this in common, Mary Ruadh and I.

Thus I did many strange things I should not have believed myself capable of doing. When Mary Ruadh went to school – this adventure of mine took place during the summer holidays – I suffered her to carry me all the way there, and to be pawed or fussed over by the other children until the bell rang and she went inside, when I was free to run home and look after my business.

But, believe it or not, when it came time for her to come home in the afternoon I would be sitting up on the gate-post with my tail curled round my legs, watching for her. True, it was also a fine vantage point from which to spit on the minister’s pug dog when it went by, but nevertheless, there I was. The neighbours used to say you could always tell what time of day it was by the MacDhui cat getting up on to the gate-post to watch for her wee mistress.

I, Thomasina, waiting on a gate-post for a somewhat grubby, red-haired and not even specially beautiful child, can you imagine?

Sometimes I wondered whether there was not another bond between us: we were each to the other something to cling to when the sun goes down and nightfall brings on fear and loneliness.

Loneliness is comforted by the closeness and touch of fur to fur, skin to skin – or skin to fur. Sometimes when I awoke at night after a bad dream, I would listen to the regular breathing of Mary Ruadh and feel the slight rise and fall of the bed-clothes about her. Then I would no longer be afraid and would go back to sleep again.

I have mentioned that Mary Ruadh was not an especially beautiful child, which perhaps was not polite, since she thought that I was certainly the most beautiful cat in the world, but I meant especially beautiful in the unusual sense. She was a rather ordinary-looking little girl except for her eyes, which told you of some special quality in her, or about her when you looked into them. Often I was not able to do so for long. Their colour was a bright blue, a most intense blue, but sometimes when she was thinking thoughts I could not understand or even guess, they turned as dark as the loch on a stormy day.

For the rest, you wouldn’t call her much to look at, with her uptilted nose and freckled face and a long lower lip that usually stuck out, while her eyebrows and lashes were so light you could hardly see them. She wore her ginger-red hair in two braids tied with green or blue ribbon. Her legs were quite long and she liked to stick her stomach out.

But there was something else pleasant about Mary Ruadh; she smelled good. Mrs McKenzie kept her washed and ironed when she was at home and she always smelled of lavender, for Mrs McKenzie kept lavender bags in with her clothes and underthings.

It seemed as if Mrs McKenzie was forever washing and ironing and starching and scenting her clothes, because it was the only way she was allowed to show how much she cared for Mary Ruadh. Mrs McKenzie was a thin woman who talked and sang through her nose. She would have mothered Mary Ruadh the way we will frequently look after somebody else’s kitten as though it were our own, but Mr MacDhui was jealous and feared that Mary Ruadh would come to love her too much if she were allowed to cuddle her. Oh, Mr Bristle-and-Smelly was allowed to cuddle her all he wished, but nobody else.

I loved the odour of lavender. Smells, almost more than noises, seem to bring on the happiness or unhappiness memories. You might not remember what it was about a smell had made you angry at the time, or afraid, but as soon as you come across it again you are angry or fearful. Like the medicine smell of Mr MacDhui.

But lavender was the happiness smell. It made my claws move in and out and brought the contentment purr to my throat.

Sometimes after putting Mary Ruadh’s things away after ironing them, Mrs McKenzie would forget to close all the chest of drawers, and leave one open. Then I would quickly nip inside and lie there full length with my nose up against a lavender bag, just smelling, smelling, smelling. That was bliss. That was when I was contented and at peace with the world.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_3e1b2e30-7df5-571f-843c-4b6504e22191)

Outside MacDhui’s surgery, Geordie McNabb went wandering away clutching his box in which the injured frog reposed on a bed of grass and young heather. Occasionally he proceeded with an absent-minded hop, skip and jump, until, brought up by recollection of the more sobering aspects of his situation, he slowed down to a mere trot or saunter.

He was not aware of going in any particular direction, but was only glad to be away once more from the ken of grown-ups who loomed over one tall, bristly and unsympathetic and hustled about with a pat on the bottom, an indignity unworthy to be bestowed upon a Wolf Cub.

But ever and anon he paused to look into the box and give the frog a tentative poke reaffirming his diagnosis of a broken leg which prevented it from hopping and carrying on a frog’s business. At such times he regarded the little fellow with a combination of interest, affection and deep concern. He was fully aware that he had a problem on his hands connected with the eventual disposition of his charge, since take it home he could not, owing to house laws on the importation of animals, while at the same time to abandon it as recommended by the veterinarian was unthinkable. It was Geordie’s first encounter with the uncooperative attitude of the world towards one who has taken the fatal step of accepting a responsibility.

His seemingly unguided wanderings had taken him to the edge of the town, that is, to the back of it where the houses ended abruptly and the several farms and meadows began, beyond which lay the dark and mysterious woods covering the hill of Glen Ardrath, where the Red Witch lived, and he realised that he had thought of this fearful alternative as a possible solution but had quickly rejected it as altogether too frightening and dangerous.

Yet now that he was there by the bridge crossing the river Ardrath, that peaceful stream flowing into Loch Fyne, but which was fed by the tumbling mountain torrents that came frothing down out of the glen, the prospect of paying her a visit seemed awesomely and repellently attractive and exciting. For it was a fact that the townspeople avoided the lair, or vicinity of the Red Witch who was also known as Daft Lori, or sometimes even Mad Lori, and most certainly small boys fed on old wives’ tales and fairy-book pictures of hook-nosed crones riding on brooms avoided the neighbourhood, except when in considerable force.

But there were two sides to the estimate of the so-called Red Witch of Glen Ardrath, one in which the picture was supplied by the overheated imagination reacting to the word ‘witch’ and the other was that she was a harmless woman who lived alone in a crofter’s cottage up in the hills where she made a living by weaving on a hand loom, conversed with birds and animals whom she nursed, mothered and fed, and communed with the angels and the Little Folk with which the glen was peopled.

Geordie was aware of both these tales. If it was true that the roe deer came down from the flanks of Ben Inver to feed out of her hand, the birds settled on her head and shoulders, the trout and salmon rose from the sunny shallows of the burn at her call and that in the stables behind the cottage where she lived there were sick beasties she found in the woods or up the rocky glen, or who came to her driven by instinct to seek human help and whom she tended back to health, why then it might well be worth the risk to deposit his frog with her. At any rate it appeared to be a legitimate excuse for the having of a tremendous adventure, whatever came of it.

He crossed the humpback bridge over the river and commenced the climb to the forest at the entrance to Glen Ardrath, past the grey bones of Castle Ardrath of which the circular inner keep and part of the stone curtain was all that had remained standing.

The home of the Red Witch was supposed to be situated a mile or more up the glen where the forest was heaviest and it took considerable courage for a small boy alone, even though panoplied as a Wolf Cub and filled with some of their woods lore, to enter the darkening area of lichened oak, spreading beech and sombre fir, and to push his way through the head-high bracken. He tamed his apprehensions by looking for and identifying the summer wildflowers in full blossom of July that cropped up beside the path he was following, purple thrift and scarlet pimpernel, yellow broom and the pink of the wild dog-rose that grew entangled with the white-flowering bramble, which in the late summer and fall would yield the sweetest blackberries. He recognised purple colum, red campion and the blue harebell, the true bluebell of Scotland, growing in profusion in a glade that seemed made by the traditional fairy ring of trees growing about a circle carpeted with flowers and warmed by shafts of sunlight that penetrated through the branches of the trees.

From there the hill climbed more steeply and he could hear, though not see, the wild rushing of the burn. He sat down there a moment to rest and took the frog out of the box and laid it on the moss where it palpitated but did not move. Watching it, Geordie felt his heart swell with pity for its plight and helplessness and, putting it back into the box, determined to see the matter through without further delay.

At last he came in sight of the cottage he sought, and with the guile of the Red Indian, properly instilled into every Wolf Cub, he paused, flattened out to reconnoitre.

The stone cottage was long and narrow and had chimneys standing up like ears at either end. The lids of green shutters were closed over the windows of its eyes and it seemed to be sleeping, poised on the edge of a clearing of the woods on what seemed to be a small plateau, a broadening of the side of the glen, and where the burn too widened out and moved more sluggishly. Behind it and off to one side was another long, low stone building that had once been a barn, no doubt, or cattle shelter. Geordie hugged his box close to his beating heart and continued to study the surroundings.

A Coven Oak raised its thick bole a dozen or so yards before the cottage and yet its spreading branches reached to the tiles of the roof, and the topmost ones overshadowed it. The great oak must have been more than two hundred years old and from the lowest of its branches there hung a silvered bell. From the tongue of the bell, a thin rope reached to the ground and trailed there. And now that he was himself quiet, Geordie was becoming aware of movements and sounds. From within the cottage there came a high, clear, sweet singing and a curiously muffled thumping. This, Geordie decided, was the witch, and he trembled now in his cover of fern and bracken and wished he had not come. The singing held him spellbound, but the thumping was sinister and ominous for he had never heard the working of a treadle on a hand loom.

Overhead, a red squirrel scolded him from the branch of a smooth grey-green beech; a raven and a hooded black crow were having a quarrel and suddenly began to flap and scream and beat one another with great strokes of their wings so that all of the birds in the area took fright and flew up, blue tits, robins, yellow wagtails, thrush and wrens, sparrow and finches. They circled the chimneys, chattering and complaining; two black and white magpies flashed in and out of the trees and from somewhere an owl called.

The voice from within rose higher in purest song though no melody that Geordie had ever heard, yet it had the strange effect of making him wish suddenly to put his hands to his eyes and weep. The beating wings ceased to flail and the cries and the flutterings of the birds quieted down. Geordie saw the white cotton tail of a rabbit down by the burn.

Thereupon, Geordie McNabb did something instinctively right and quite brave. He crept out from beneath his cover and advanced as far as the bell suspended from the Coven Tree and the rope hanging therefrom. At the foot of it he deposited his box with the frog in it and gave the rope a gentle tug until the bell, shivering and vibrating, rent the forest with its silvery echoes, stilling the voice and the thumping from within the house. As fast as his stumpy legs could carry him, Geordie fled across the clearing and dived once more into the safety of the cover of thick green fern.

The peal of the bell died away, but the quiet was immediately shattered by the hysterical barking of a dog. A Scotch terrier came racing around from the barn behind the house. A hundred birds rose into the air, making a soughing and whirring with their wings as they flew wildly about the chimneys. Two cats came walking formally and with purpose around the corner of the house, their tails straight up in the air, a black and a tiger-striped grey. They sat down quietly some distance away and waited. As Geordie watched, a young roe buck suddenly appeared out of the underbrush, head up and alert, the sun shining from its moist black nose and liquid eyes. It moved warily, tossing its fine head, its eyes fixed upon the house where the front door was slowly opening and with infinite caution.

Geordie McNabb’s heart beat furiously and he came close to giving way to panic and running for all he was worth. But his curiosity to see the Red Witch of Glen Ardrath, now that he had come this far and dared so much, and his need to find out what was to become of his frog, kept him there.

The door opened wide, but no Red Witch appeared, almost to Geordie McNabb’s disappointment, only a young woman, hardly more than a girl, it seemed to Geordie, a plain girl, a country girl, such as you could see anywhere on the farms surrounding Inveranoch, in simple skirt and smock with thick stockings and shoes, and a shawl around her shoulders.

She could not have been a witch, for she was neither beautiful nor hideous, and yet little Geordie found that he could not seem to take his eyes from her countenance. What was it that drew and held his gaze? He could not tell. Her nose was long and wise, and the space between it and her upper lip seemed wide and humorous so that somehow it made you want to smile looking at it. The mouth was both tender and rueful, and in the grey-green eyes there was a far-away look. Her hair, which hung loose to her shoulders in the fashion of country girls, was not bound and was the cherry colour of a glowing blacksmith’s bar before he begins to cool it.